Romans 6:1-2 (NKJV) 1What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? 2Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?
In our last post we looked at the first 6 verses of James letter to the church. We found that one of the ways we need to resist the devil is to resist the pull of the world and those aspects of human culture which go against the truth of the Word of God. In Genesis 6 it speaks of Noah as being perfect in his Generation. That did not mean that he was without flaw. It meant that when the flow of his culture was what the Bible describes as “only evil continually,” he chose to go against that flow and follow God and his words. We must be willing to choose the things of God even when it means we must go against the flow of our culture.
This leads us to the next area in which we must resist the devil. We must resist sin. Sin comes into our lives via temptation. Temptation takes advantage of the things we may enjoy in the world. Although it is not always the devil directly tempting us, Sin is his nature and he is always trying to lead us away from God. James discusses this in chapter 1 verses 12 through 18 of his letter. However, I think Paul gives us a very thorough look at how we can successfully resist sin.
In today’s scripture, Paul has been accused of teaching that we are free to sin because of God’s grace manifested in Christ. This is a message that gained great popularity some years ago. Although the revelation of the grace of God can be powerful to free us from guilt, the Bible never says that sin is acceptable for the child of God. Here we see Paul letting his readers know we should not continue in sin even though grace is available to those who have received the redemption purchased by the blood of Jesus.
In the King James Version, Paul uses the declaration, “God forbid” concerning such a thought. In both translations Paul asks us, “How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it.” He tied this thought to how we resist the temptation to sin. We must understand that our old nature, which he calls in Ephesians 2 the nature of a child of wrath, died in the process of salvation. Before we were saved, it was our nature to sin. After salvation does its work inside us, that is no longer our nature. In 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul says that if we are in Christ, we are new creatures. Old things, like the nature of sin that came in man’s fall in the Garden of Eden, have passed away and all things have become new.
When a Christian sins, it is a result of the residue of the person we were. We were made new in spirit at salvation but our life experiences, our teaching and training, our culture and all the influences from our lives before Christ still cause us to respond according to the nature of wrath that was once the thing that dominated us. According to Romans 12, Paul tells us that achieving complete transformation and overcoming sin requires the renewal of our minds. This is the process by which the living word of God, Hebrews 4:12, overwrites our pre-salvation thinking and causes us to resist sin from the inside out instead of trying to overcome it by keeping the law from the outside in. In Romans 8 Paul points out the futility of trying to overcome sin by keeping the law.
Romans 8:3 (NKJV) 3For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh,
The flesh is the weakness of the law because if our flesh is involved it will fight against demands of the law. However, in Romans 6, Paul’s focus on the inward change brought about by the new birth, shows us how we really need to resist sin. First, we must recognize that we are dead to its influence.
Paul reminds his readers that baptism is more than a religious ritual.
Romans 6:3-4 (KJV) 3Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? 4Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
This is talking about water baptism. The word translated “baptism” means fully wet and is used of Christian water baptism. We tend to think of water baptism as a simple ritual. It is, I believe, an outward symbol of an inward reality. The idea is that what happened to us in the new birth according to 2 Corinthians 5, is shown in our “burial” in the water and our resurrection to a new life as we are raised out of the water. I believe it is that, but I believe it is more. Paul indicates that we were raised from the dead to walk in the newness of life in Jesus. I believe there is a spiritual reality to this process as well as a symbolic one. Let us look at this verse in the Amplified Bible.
Romans 6:4 (AMP) 4We were buried therefore with Him by the baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious [power] of the Father, so we too might [habitually] live and behave in newness of life.
He says that in the same way Christ was raised by the glorious power of God, we were also raised to “habitually walk” in the power of new life in Christ. To me this implies that there is a power released when we are baptized that will help us overcome sin. For this to be true, we must enter water baptism by faith not just by ritual. We must believe the promise that we will be raised up by the power of God. I believe it is also important that the one baptizing must also approach the process by faith. In the next 3 verses, Paul clarifies his case.
Romans 6:5-7 (NKJV) 5For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, 6knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. 7For he who has died has been freed from sin.
We have been identified with Christ in his death, burial and resurrection. His death became our death to sin. His burial became our burial, and his resurrection became our resurrection. Paul implies that this is just as much a reality in our lives as in his. We can see this in verse 7. “For he who has died has been freed from sin.”
Since we died with Christ, we can believe that we will live with him. He died and rose again so death can no longer affect him. In reality, it can no longer influence us either, since we died and were raised from death in him. Since sin is a product of death, we are no longer legally under its influence. We do not have to sin.
Paul tells us that in light of this spiritual reality we must “reckon” ourselves dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. To reckon ourselves dead to sin means we should consider ourselves dead to sin. We must also consider ourselves alive to God. As we choose to accept that as our spiritual reality, sin will have less of a hold upon us. If we believe that sin is still our nature, our resistance to it will be focused in the flesh. All we can do is try to obey the law. The problem is that law is flesh trying to control flesh. We read in Romans 8 that this method of resistance is short circuited by the weakness of the flesh.
The more I meditate on things like Romans 6, the more faith I will have that sin cannot overcome me. I am dead to it, but more importantly I am alive to God, and his life is flowing in my life. I will begin to resist sin, not just with my will and my mind, but will see a power released in me that enables me to resist sin from the inside, our born again spirit, to help control the outside. This is neither easy nor automatic so Paul continues by showing how we must apply this. We will look at the next step in our next post.
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